Fully connected – from the past up to the future.

FLAM ist the tool or API for platform-spanning data exchange and for the internationalization of different platforms, formats, and character sets. When data have to be transferred from WINDOWS, UNIX/LINUX, or MAC to a mainframe or vice versa, our Universal Converter (FLUC) can be used for record-oriented reading and writing of any physical file format, for transforming unstructured texts to records, for converting, transliterating, or substituting character sets, for codec processing, decoding, unpacking, and many other contexts.

For example, a German private bank saves about 75-85% CPU utilization on the mainframe for communication with external partners, which usually use open standards. That is possible because a single command issued to only one tool can be used to convert between various formats with record lengths or delimiters as well as between numerous character sets (e.g. ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode) without any temporary files. The result can be compressed with GZIP, encrypted with PGP and sent to the target system via SSH.

When using all these capabilities via our record interface from a COBOL/PL1 application without writing the data to a dataset on disk, another 50% of CPU/MSU can be saved. The reading of open as well as classical host data formats occurs completely transparent to the application. Hence, it is very easy to process all these formats within an application and to save another 75-85% of CPU/MSU. Via our byte interface, we also offer support for modern programming languages and web applications, including C/C++ and Java. For these kinds of applications, classical host formats are also supported transparently, so that both worlds are accessible on the modern mainframes through FLAM in a cost-efficient manner.

By the way: every FLAMFILE created with FLAM can be decrypted at any time on any platform since FLAM is designed to ensure upward and downward compatibility. That means: legacy applications can access newer data sets as usual, while older data may be adapted to modern formats. Thus we build bridges between the past and the future.